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Firefox is raping my memory

by Steven Hodson on November 13, 2008 · Comments

I realize that just about everyone and their brother in the tech work is all infatuated with Firefox but why this browser gets such a walk when it comes to memory problems is beyond me. I had originally switched to Chrome when it came out because I wasn’t happy with the beta of IE8 (still not) and I never really liked Firefox but recently I decided to give the new beta of Firefox another try.

Even though initially it used more memory than Chrome I continued using through several beta updates even though I did experience problems with it. That was until yesterday though when I finally had enough of the browser deciding that my memory (2Gig) was a three course meal. Within a few seconds of starting up Firefox after rebooting my system this is what Task Manager informed me that Firefox (with 3 tabs loading and no plugins installed) was using this amount of memory


Firefox memory seconds after starting up

After waiting a little bit longer to see if the remaining two tabs would finally load this is what Task Manager informed me Firefox’s memory usage was

Firefox memory before closing it out with Task Manager

Sorry but that just isn’t acceptable.

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Tagged as: browsers, chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer 8, Mozilla, Task Manager

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  • Can you give us some more details about what version you're using and what pages you're opening? We run memory usage tests on every build of the browser and haven't seen this happen, but would appreciate your feedback!
  • k here's the rundown since it's pretty simple

    OS: Vista SP1
    Firefox: 3.0.4
    Plugins: 0
    # of tabs set to open: 3

    Now ... I'm not sure as I can't really test this but I don't recall having this bad of a problem before installing the upgrade to the newest version of Flash that recently was released via auto update. However none of the pages set to load use Flash as far as I know. So that could be a wild goose chase but felt worthwhile mentioning just in case.
  • I even tried rolling back the flash plugin to v9.0 but with no luck at all. The browser still locks up with on tab loaded and the first two tabs stuck in a loop and ramping the CPU to 100% and eating up memory like it is going out of style.

    The only thing I can think of left to try is to uninstall this build clean out the systems of anything to do with FF and reinstall a new copy. Any suggestions as to what build to try (no plugins used) will be welcome.
  • Steven,

    I admit that Firefox is a memory hog generally speaking, but I have never seen that type of memory usage before. On my setup, I have several plugins (webdev, StumbleUpon, Delicious, ReadItLater and several others) and I normally open over 100 tabs in a day. My memory consumption has never gone above 500MB. I am not saying 500MB is good, they do not reclaim memory allocated for tabs very well, but I think there may be a problem in your setup. Definitely work with those guys to see what the problem is.
  • joemontana
    odd, I'm running FF 3.0.4 here, with 7 tabs open, as well as running some graphics conversion stuff, FF isn't using all that much memory.

    Joe
  • rawr
    What else are you going to use your memory for? If it's high, you're browsing the internet, if you have tabs open, they're using memory. Would you prefer to redownload all of the pages/images/etc that are most likely going to remain static between downloads? Where else is it going to store all of the images it downloads besides in memory? In space?

    I have 15 tabs open (with sites like GMail) and 20 add-ons installed. Firefox is using only 312MB of ram. :)
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